Robert Draper Responds

I wrote to Robert Draper to pose the question with which I was left after reading his piece: What did he think motivated Secretary Rumsfeld? He kindly sent the following reply:

To be charitable to Rumsfeld, I think he had the following honest views: 1) the military required transformation; 2) the DOD has a certain primacy and impingements on it should not be taken lightly; and 3) he was lot smarter than most (though to be fair, he frequently brought in people from the outside for consultation, albeit folks like Shultz and Kissinger who didn't exactly challenge his fundamental precepts). I think he wanted to know all there was to know -- those knotty "unknown unknowns" bedeviled him -- but he didn't trust ordinary channels to provide the information. So, as I say in the piece, he sought to know all he could but also sought to control all he could, and the latter would come at the expense of the former. Two examples: he inserted himself into the promotions process, with the result that a one-star general seeking to be a two-star would never tell Rumsfeld something he didn't want to hear; and he stopped meeting the JCS in the Tank & instead conducted meetings in a conference room with assorted civilian subordinates, with the result that the Chiefs wouldn't feel comfortable dispensing intimate wartime strategy with a bunch of ideologues & eggheads in the room.